Practical Alphabet

Effort need not only be the rigors of hard focus. Creative effort involves play, exploration and invention. Free writing is a magical way to bypass the controlling, fearful part of most of us that arises in the face of imaginative practice. To free write, get some paper and a pen. (It is definitely possible to […]

Writing is work, and there’s not reason to expect it to be otherwise. Have a growth mindset: think effort, rather than talent. All talent can do is help the effort pay off. Talent can also , I think, be learned: it’s a side-product of effort. Even if you want to give talent some ur-role, pride

For years, I longed for a daily practice while taking comfort in the authors who claimed not to have one. Some months I wrote morning pages every day. Some months I didn’t. Some stretches I labored at my novel, meeting friends in cafes to force myself to stay at the task. Other stretches I set

Writers get courage from other writers, which is to say, from books and stories. Seek out the ones that astonish you, that make you say, “You can do that?” Seek out the ones that seep into you and charge you with the will to take risks. Writer friends and writing groups can similarly ballast and

Begin badly, begin with questions (write them down), begin with a line that pops into your head or a few words you force from your pen. Begin with a character whose only partly visible to you, with eavesdropping in a cafe or on your own memories or imagination. Begin though the critic rises up in

I like starting with action. We writers are often excellent at observation. A lot may be going on in the depths below the surface, and there’s certainly something to be said for that, but it traps us in two ways. First, we can be inclined to shy away from action in our stories. Ensconced at